Archive for the ‘E30’ tag

Less than a year after it approved the sale of E15 – a mixture of 15 percent ethanol with 85 percent gasoline – the EPA has begun to suggest doubling that percentage despite concerns about the existing levels of ethanol in fuel.

As reported by the New York Times earlier this month, the EPA’s proposal of E30 came buried deep in a report released in March about sulfur levels in fuel. The proposal calls not only for increasing the percentage of ethanol in fuel to 30 percent, but also for pushing car manufacturers to tune their engines with higher compression ratios to better burn E30. As the Times pointed out, the proposal is designed as much to reduce emissions and improve fuel economy as it is to engineer support for more ethanol in fuel.

“You make the dog like the dog food,” William H. Woebkenberg, a senior engineer for fuels policy for Mercedes-Benz, told the Times.

The ethanol industry has been promoting E30 at least since 2007, describing it as an optimal blend for fuel economy. However, beyond concerns from the automakers and AAA that the engines in new cars aren’t designed to run on blends much higher than 10 percent, collector car owners who use the same fuel have noted that the ethanol can actually damage their vehicles.

Meanwhile, at least a couple of state legislatures have expressed misgivings about ethanol content in fuel. Earlier this month, Maine’s lawmakers voted to ban any ethanol-blended fuel as long as at least two other New England states also banned it, citing potential damage as a result of its use along with the impact of ethanol fuel’s use on food supplies. (The two-other-states provision was included to ensure a large enough supply of non-ethanol fuel from regional refineries.) As the Bangor Daily News reported, the vote came on the heels of a similar bill that Maine’s governor signed earlier this month banning fuel with ethanol content greater than 10 percent. In each of the last two years, New Hampshire’s state legislature passed a bill banning all ethanol-blended fuels, but the bill did not become law.